Get Agile

Once you have your survivor alliance, once you built a team around your new idea, what if you encounter resistance? Not all ideas are going to go over well. So, when you encounter resistance to some of the new ideas, how do you proceed in those cases?

So, I think the biggest idea, the biggest kind of risk that I took professionally was when I was at PayPal. The development teams were building software in a very sort of old fashioned way. It was waterfall, everything happens in sequence and the entire industry, particularly startups, the smaller companies were using Agile, these small, intact cross-functional teams to do work. And so I had had implemented Agile at Salesforce. It had been wildly successful within my team. We had just got and so much more productive. We had higher velocity. So, just faster in everything that we were doing. And so I got to PayPal and they were slow. They'd slowed down in innovation. They weren't getting the innovation out the door. And so I proposed to my boss James Barrese, the CTO that we should go to Agile, he said, great. Yeah, we've been reading about it. It's probably a great idea. And I said, what's controversial here is instead of doing a pilot and then moving and then doing a wave, I want to take the entire organization to this new way of working overnight. So, like the big bang. This is a very risky strategy, but I realized from my experience at Salesforce, if you did this in phases, the company would have all of the pain from the change without the benefits of the change, because the entire organization needed to be working this way before you would actually start to feel the benefits, but it was super high risk. And I told him, I said, listen, this is super high risk. And if I fail, I am going to fail spectacularly. It's going to be like the biggest failure you've ever seen in your entire life.

Hey, go big or go home girl.

It was totally, it was a go big or go home moment. I had one male senior leader say to me, you are all sizzle and no stake. And basically what he was saying in a not very elegant way was I see you talking a lot but I'm not seeing the benefit or the results of this. So, fortunately for me and my boss, it was wildly successful. It was like one of the most successful major transformations that PayPal had seen. And immediately the innovation engine unlocked and within six months had 52 new products that had been launched. In the prior 18 months, it had only been three. So, I mean the Delta in terms…

That's amazing.

… of the shift was incredible and set the foundation for the PayPal that we know today.